Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Gaza Déjà Vu

By Alan
Caruba

While
everyone welcomes a cease fire between Hamas in Gaza and the Israelis, no one
should expect it to last very long or that relations between the two will
change. In point of fact, the Israelis struck a bargain with terrorists, not
a nation-state.

Reflecting
on the cease fire, David Singer, a lawyer, noted that “The document is not an
Agreement, but merely an Understanding” and that “the parties to the
Understanding are not specifically identified, nor has the document been signed
by any parties that are supposed to be bound by the Understanding.” At best,
the “Palestinian factions” who have the greatest interest in attacking Israel
are not a party to the cease fire, nor is al Qaeda or Iran for whom Hamas is a
proxy in Gaza as Hezbollah is one in Lebanon.

Israel has
merely bought some time in which to determine what it will do next. Time is
running out, not just in Gaza, but with regard to Iran’s nuclear program,
deemed by observers to be mere months from being able to put a nuclear warhead
on a missile and send it hurtling toward Israel to kill millions of its
citizens and essentially destroying it as a viable nation.

If there
is any good news out of the recent conflict, it is that its “iron Dome” defense
system against rockets worked remarkably well. The bad news is that its enemies
have learned that it can be overwhelmed if enough rockets are fired at the same
time. Moreover, Iranian rockets have the capacity to hit Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem.

Daniel
Pipes of the Middle East Forum had some reflections on the Hamas-Israel
hostilities, noting that “The old Arab-Israeli wars were military clashes; the
recent ones are political clashes. The wars of 1948-49, 1967, and 1973 were
life-and-death struggles for the Jewish state. But the wars of 2006, 2008-09, and
now 2012 are media events in which Israeli victory on the military battlefield
is foreordained and the struggle is to win public opinion.”

In the
U.S. evangelical Christians are the largest group of supporters for Israel.
Among those with far less sympathy for Israel are a significant percentage of
Democrats and the first term of the Obama administration made it clear that the
President is no friend to Israel. At one point he called for a return to the
1967 borders and opposed housing construction in Jerusalem. Dispatching
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to engineer a cease fire ensured that the
U.S. would not be drawn into the conflict.

Many have
expressed surprise that Egypt would take a significant role as a mediator, but
few missed the fact that the U.S. was in a position to withhold $1.5 billion in
foreign aid to Egypt whose economy is in serious trouble. Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's president has been traveling
far and wide in the Middle East to secure aid, including from the Saudis, a
leader of the Sunni majority of Islam, and always the hidden hand influencing
events in the region, as well as the nation most fearful of the Shiite nation
Iran.

Read More...”Both sides in
the conflict appear to be testing Egypt’s new leader. Hamas, the Islamist
Palestinian offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, is wondering how much
support it may draw from its ideological cousins now that they control the
Egyptian state, while Israel’s hawkish leadership seem to probe the depth of
Mr. Morsi’s stated commitment to the peace treaty as well.”

“For Mr. Morsi, the test is forcing him to reconcile
conflicting elements of his own persona: as the Islamist firebrand who has
denounced the Israelis as ‘vampires’ for killing Palestinian civilians and
lauded Hamas for resisting an illegal occupation, but also as the newly elected
president promising stability, economic revival and friendly relations with
Israel’s Western allies.”

Despite the Times reference to “an illegal occupation”,
the fact is that Israel withdrew from Gaza in a “land for peace” effort that
has clearly failed. Israel does not illegally occupy land that is rooted in the
millennia of its existance.

Dr. Pipes reflected on the timing of Hamas’s ramping up
of rocket attacks on Israel that had been going on for months. He conjectured
that the last attacks were to “test the waters in the aftermath of Barack
Obama’s reelection”, to “rouse public opinion against Israel and make it pay a
price internationally”, “refute accusations by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that
it has abandoned resistance”, and remind the Palestinian Authority, as it seeks
statehood at the United Nations, who controls Gaza.”

The effort of Fatah, based in the West Bank after having
been driven out of Gaza, to secure statehood went nowhere in the U.N. Indeed,
the so-called Palestinians have never had anything but rhetorical support and
have been dependent on a U.N. refugee agency for actual support. They
constitute the oldest unresolved refugee population in the world.

In August 2010, The New York Times reported on a survey
by Al Arabiya television network in which “a staggering 71 percent of the
Arabic respondents have no interest in Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.”

It
noted that “For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab
invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian
territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights” and that “from 1948 to
1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to
statehood.”

So, yes, while it’s a good thing that the rockets are not
flying, the “Iron Dome” proved successful, and the Israeli Air Force was able
to kill some of the militant leadership and degrade its arsenal and ability to
proceed to some degree, the current cease fire is a largely meaningless
“understanding.”

What remains to be understood is the unremitting
hostility to Israel that exists throughout the Middle East and globally where
anti-Semitism has existed for centuries. The Israelis have merely bought some
time until the next attacks.

The wild card remains Israel’s need to attack Iran’s
nuclear and military facilities. Only by inflicting major damage will Israel
have any chance of survival. Long a nuclear nation, Israel must stop Iran from
becoming one.

Mr Caruba, by far you give us the most balanced state of things in the mideast. In South Africa, with a criminal cummunist, terrorist regime, the in depth news is non excisting. I can only hope on our alike thinker in Israel, Bibi Nethanyahu, to wipe these terrorist scum of the face of the earth. It's possible. The muslims are the weirdest people on earth and by now it's clear that you cannot trust one of them. They started the current conflict, but as soon as they are punched, they cry and call upon the UN to solve what they did wrong. Again, your blog is very well read in SA!

The fact that the United States now relies on Israel to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear nation shows how far down Obama has already taken us. We are no longer the dominant world leader and we are soon to become vulnerable to attack by a country that considers us the Great Satan and is hell bent to destroy us.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.